Hi everybody.
I will be taking you through the story of THE LOST ARK OF THE COVENANT (Solving the 2,500 Year Old Mystery
of the Fabled Biblical Ark).

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K

THE CAVE

t was a time of drought.
In 1987 my home was a grass hut in a dried-out tribal area
of central Zimbabwe in southern Africa, completely cut off
from the outside world. I had been doing fieldwork on a
mysterious African tribe called the Lemba. This was part of my
job. At the time I was Lecturer in Hebrew in the Department
of Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the School of Oriental
and African Studies (SOAS) in the University of London and
for a while now this tribe had been my main academic subject.
How had I spent my time in the village? In the blistering heat
of the day I would wander over the hills near the village and poke
around the remains of the ancient stone-building culture, which,
the Lemba claimed, was the work of their distant ancestors. With
my little trowel I had discovered a few bones, pieces of local
pottery, and one or two iron tools of uncertain age. Not much to
write home about. Then I would read, write up my notes, and
spend much of the night listening to the elders’ narratives.
The Lemba harbored an astonishing claim to be of Israelite
origin, although the presence of Israelites or Jews in central
1
the lost ark of the covenant
Africa had never before been attested. On the other hand,
since early medieval times there had been rumors of lost Jewish
kingdoms in darkest Africa. What I had heard was that the
tribe believed that when they left Israel they settled in a city
called Senna—somewhere across the sea. No one had any idea
where in the world this mysterious Senna was located and
neither did I. The tribe had asked me to find their lost city, and
I had promised to try.
What I knew about the 40,000-strong Lemba tribe in 1987
was that they were black, they spoke various Bantu languages
such as Venda or Shona, they lived in various locations in South
Africa and Zimbabwe, they were physically indistinguishable
from their neighbors and that they had a host of customs and
traditions identical to those of the African tribes among whom
they lived.
They appeared to be completely African.
But, on the other hand, they also had some mysterious customs
and legends that did not appear to be African. They
did not intermarry with other tribes. They did not traditionally
eat with other groups. They circumcised their boys. They
practiced the ritual slaughter of animals, using a special knife;
they refused to eat pigs and a number of other creatures; they
sacrificed animals on high places like the ancient Israelites;
and they followed many of the other laws of the Old Testament.
The sighting of the new moon was of cardinal importance
for them as it is for Jews. Their clan names looked as
if they were derived from Arabic or Hebrew or some other
Semitic language.
During the months I had spent in the village trying to unveil
their secrets, I never found the absolute proof—the smoking


gun, demonstrating that their oral tradition, which linked them
with ancient Israel, was true. I never found an inscription on
stone, a fragment of a Hebrew prayer, an artifact from ancient
Israel. Not even a coin or a shard of pottery.
Before arriving in Zimbabwe I had spent a couple of months
with the large Lemba communities in the neighboring country
of South Africa. Here the leaders of the tribe had given me a
good deal of information. I had hoped to build on this in
Zimbabwe and asked the local Lemba chief to facilitate my
research. Chief Mposi called a meeting of the elders of the
Lemba clans and, tempted by my promise to try to find their
lost city of Senna, they formally agreed to permit me to
research their history.
But subsequently they did not tell me nearly as much as I
had hoped they would. They were tight-lipped about anything
to do with their religious practices. It was only my willingness
to sit around late into the night, until my whisky had loosened
the old men’s tongues, that had enabled me to hear something
of their remarkable cult.
The following day they would regret their nocturnal indiscretions
and mutter that the clan elders shouldn’t have authorized
my research, that white men had no business meddling in
their affairs, and that I should stop trying to penetrate the
cloak of secrecy that veiled their religious rites.
Others tried to frighten me into leaving by telling me lurid
tales of what had happened to previous generations of
researchers who had wandered too far down forbidden paths.
One of them had been forcibly circumcised after daring to walk
on Dumghe, the tribe’s sacred mountain. Another had wandered
too close to a sacred cave at the base of Dumghe, and had

been stabbed with a traditional assegai and badly beaten. He
had narrowly escaped with his life.
As my hopes of finding the critical clue regarding their true
identity began to die, so did the crops in the fields around the
village. It had not rained at all for months. There was some
thick muddy liquid at the bottom of the boreholes. Every
morning the women brought water in rusty old oilcans balanced
on their heads. When that was gone, there would be
nothing left to drink. Except beer from the bottle shop, for
people with money. And there weren’t many of those.
This morning, early, before the sun had risen, the chief had
called for a rain ceremony. The chief ’s messenger had arrived
just as the household was beginning to stir. The cooking fire
was being blown into life and water was being heated for tea
and the washing water, which was brought every morning to my
hut by the daughter of my gentle host, Sevias. The messenger
told Sevias that his presence would be required that evening.
This was a last desperate throw of the dice.
There had been drought for so long that the streams that
once had brought life and the occasional fish to the village
had completely disappeared. They now looked like goat
tracks filled with deep, fine dust. With no water, life in the
village would soon become impossible. The tribe would have
to move elsewhere. But where? The drought covered the
whole land.
Toward evening the elders and notables congregated in the
chief ’s large hut at the center of his kraal—the group of huts
that formed his property. They had been invited to drink

chibuku—home-brewed maize beer, the consistency of porridge,
dance the night away, and to entreat the ancestors for rain. This
was deepest Africa.
Sevias invited me to accompany him. We walked together
across the parched earth as he told me about the great herds he
had once owned, of the trees groaning with fruit, of the maize
that used to be as big as pumpkins.
We were among the first guests. I sat next to Sevias on a
baked-mud bench circling the hut and watched the preparations
for the ancestor party with keen interest. I had never
imagined I would be permitted to observe anything as close as
this undoubtedly was to the heart of their cult.
I had a camera, tape recorder, and notebook. I was fairly sure
that this evening would provide me with the material for at
least one academic article, and an impressive one at that.
Chief Mposi sat alone. He was in poor health and gave the
impression of being preoccupied. He stared at the mud floor,
resting his head on the knop of his stick. With a sudden movement
he bawled at his wives to serve beer.
“It’s sitting there and it’s not doing any good to anyone!”
“I’m serving it,” snapped his oldest wife, lifting up the beer
pot with her muscular arms.
“Too late,” he growled.
The chibuku pot was passed from hand to hand, from right to
left, with no unseemly show of haste, like a decanter of Madeira
after a dons’ dinner at Oxford.
The silence was broken by the chief calling out the names of
his four wives. They were singularly different from each other
in age, size, and beauty. They answered in turn, knelt side by
side, and started to clap. They turned away from the chief, rose

to their feet and lit candles, as the other women began ululating
and whistling.
A long antelope horn was thrust through the opening into
the hut and a triumphant blast silenced the shrill sound of the
women. The man blowing the horn was tall and well built. He
was wearing a skirt made of strips of black fur and around his
head he had a strip of leopard skin. He was the witch doctor.
His name was Sadiki—one of the Lemba clan names—an
unmistakably Semitic name whose presence in central Africa
was a mysterious anomaly. He led the ceremony. Magagada
rattles made of dried marrows were tied to his ankles with bark
fiber thongs. He stamped his feet on the earthen floor of the
hut and blew a long haunting note on the horn.
Four elderly women sitting together on the mud bench that
went round the hut started pounding on wooden drums. The
rest of the guests were clustered behind the witch doctor,
propelled into the small, juddering movements of the dance
by the rhythms of the drums and the magagada rattles, barely
moving, lost in concentration.
Sadiki stood at the epicenter of the storm of sound, directing
its movement. He had an overpoweringly regal air, and looked
arrogantly around him. Suggestively he moved a foot. Then a
hand. His body followed and, positioning himself in front of
one of the drums, he danced, like David before the Ark, pausing
to blow the ram’s horn similar to the shofar that had once
been blown in the Temple of Jerusalem. The drummers looked
far too old and frail to be able to produce such a sound and yet
they were to drum for hours without a pause.
The beer started to circulate faster. Poverty had taken its
grip on the village. It had been a long time since the beer pots
had been passed around so liberally. Some of the men, no
longer accustomed to drinking, were already inebriated.
The chief ’s oldest wife was apparently already possessed by
the spirits of the ancestors. Staring from side to side she fell to
the ground weeping. Looking around in an unfocused way she
pulled her long, western-style dress up over her fat marbled
buttocks and over her head. She danced naked, positioning
herself in the space in front of the women drummers vacated
by Sadiki.

The pulse quickened again. Sadiki, sweat pouring down his
broad, muscular chest, placed a headdress of black eagle feathers
on the naked woman’s head. Sevias told me that this was to show
respect to the ancestors. She danced on, casting great shadows
on the candlelit walls. She fell to her knees, sobbing, in front of
the old chief and tenderly placed the headdress on his head.
The chief was dying. Everyone said so. He looked gray and ill.
He gestured to me that I should join him. He took my hand in
his and whispered in my ear, “The ancestors have come from
Israel: they have come from Senna. They are here with us.
Good-bye, Mushavi. Perhaps we shall see each other in Senna.”
Senna was the lost city from which they had come and it was
also the place they expected to go when they died.
His face, illuminated by the flickering light of the candles,
was corrugated with lines of age and illness; his eyes were
concealed by dewlaps of mottled light-colored flesh. He peered
at me and then indicated that I should rise and leave him.
Saddened and mystified by his words, I went back to the bench
to my notebook, camera, and recorder.
I had been here in the village so long I was beginning to feel
at home, one of them. I had drunk a good deal of their chibuku

beer. After the first few swigs it becomes more or less palatable
and after a while positively acceptable. It struck me that this
was no time for sitting in a corner taking notes and recording
Lemba music. There were more important things to do. This
was more a time for observer participation. I removed my shirt
in order, as I thought, to blend in with the half-naked men and
women whose ghoulish shadows were leaping wildly on the
walls and who were falling into a kind of trance all around me.
The chief ’s oldest wife crossed the hut, leaned over me, her
withered breasts brushing my shoulder, and whispered something
incomprehensible in Shona, the language of the dominant
Shona tribe among whom the Zimbabwe Lemba lived.
I started to dance to the pounding rhythm of the drums.
One of the chief ’s younger wives was dancing topless in front
of me, swaying drunkenly, supplicating the ancestors, running
her hands over her breasts and down over her belly and legs.
The women drummers quickened the rhythm of their
drums.
Another woman in a bleary-eyed trance slid out of her
clothes and moved into the center of the hut. Men stood
around her admiring her slim body and full breasts, urging
her on.
“She is speaking to the ancestors,” Sevias bellowed in my ear.
“Soon they will reply. When their voices are heard it will be
better for you to leave.”
Toward midnight there was a change in the atmosphere. I
imagined that the time had come for the cultic incantations
and secret prayers to be offered up. These were the closely
guarded things. These were the oral codes that governed their
lives and that no doubt held the clues to their past that I was

seeking. These codes and incantations were for me the heart of
the matter. This is what I wanted to be part of. This is what I
had come here for.
My arms were raised; my face was turned up to the straw
roof above. Sweat was pouring off me. I felt a great sense of
excitement. I had been accepted. I was one of them. The
ancestors were about to descend and I would be there to
observe what happened next. No one from the outside had ever
observed this before. Inside my head I could feel a kind of
channel opening that seemed to be a channel of communication
with the Israelite ancestors of the tribe.
I was rejoicing in the efficacy of my five-star research
methodology when I felt a fist driven into the side of my face.
It was the fist of the chief ’s oldest and sturdiest wife. I fell to
the ground on top of the recumbent and malodorous body of
Mposi’s greatest drunk—a sort of tramp called Klopas whom I
had met and smelled many times before. For a few seconds I
lost consciousness. I was pulled out of the hut by some of the
men and propped up against the side of the chief ’s hut.
“Er, I upset the chief ’s wife,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
I did not feel at all sorry. I felt bloody furious.
“Mushavi,” said Sevias leaning over me. “You did not upset
anybody. This blow was just a welcome from the ancestors.
Perhaps it was also a little warning. Just a little warning. If the
ancestors had not wanted you here at all they would not have
given you a light blow like this but they would have torn you
into pieces. Now you must go because the ancestors are coming
among us. The uninitiated must leave.”
The spirits of the ancestors would not be happy to see me
there, he explained. Secrets would be shared. There were
things I should not know. Truculently, I thought to myself if I
don’t get to learn the secret things, here, tonight, the chances
are I never will. It was now or never.
Outside the hut, a group of elders were looking anxiously at
the night sky, hoping for signs of rain. Sevias sat down next to
me against the wall. His kindly lined face betrayed signs of
concern. His concern was not only for the rain, or lack of it,
although this was as critical a matter for him as for the others—
indeed his own life and the life of his family depended upon
it—but also for me and my disappointment at not being admitted
to all the tribal secrets. I had already told him that my fieldwork
had not yielded as much as I had hoped.
Head cocked, his hands held in a gesture of supplication, he
asked with just a hint of a smile, “Mushavi, have you found what
you were looking for in your time with us?”
He often honored me with the tribal praise name Mushavi,
which the Lemba generally use solely among themselves and
which I thought could perhaps be connected with Musawi—the
Arabic form of “follower of Moses (Musa).” Perhaps he was
trying to flatter me by calling me Mushavi but the rest of his
question was incomprehensible. He knew full well that the
tribal secrets for the most part were still intact.
I smiled and with as much patience as I could muster said,
“You know very well, Sevias, that there are still many secrets
you have not told me. And don’t forget the elders of all the
clans agreed that I should be given access to everything.”
“Yes,” he replied gravely, “but many times I have explained to
you that no matter what was said at that meeting of the clans,
there are things that cannot be told outside the brotherhood of
the initiated. Prayers, spells, incantations. Many of our secret
cannot be revealed. We told you that. My brother, the chief, told
you that. The others told you that. They would have to kill you,
Mushavi, if you learned those sacred things. That is the law.”
His lined face became almost a parody of concern and anxiety.
Sevias was a good man. In all the months I had spent in his
kraal, despite the drought and the uncertain political situation
both within the tribe and in the country at large, despite family
difficulties, he had always been calm, kind, and dignified. I
realized now that I had never been happier in my life than
sitting writing under the great tree in Sevias’s kraal.
He shuffled his bare, calloused feet in the parched earth.
“But how about the tribal objects?” I insisted. “Those things
you brought with you from the north, from Senna. I’ve been
told about these but I’ve still seen nothing of them.”
“It’s true,” he said. “We brought objects from Jerusalem long
ago and we brought objects from Senna. Sacred, important
objects from Israel and Senna.”
Senna was the original lost city that the tribe maintained it
had once inhabited after leaving the land of Israel. Professor
M. E. R. Mathivha—the scholarly head of the Lemba tribe in
South Africa—had already told me a good deal about their
Senna legend. The tribe had come from Senna “across the
sea.” No one knew where it was. They had crossed “Pusela”—
but no one knew where or what that was either. They had
come to Africa where they twice rebuilt Senna. That was the
sum of it.
“Sevias,” I insisted, “can’t you at least tell me what happened
to the tribal objects?”
He studied the sky and said nothing. Then he murmured,
“The tribe is scattered over a wide area. You know, once we

broke the law of God. We ate mice, which are forbidden to us,
and we were scattered by God among the nations of Africa. So
the objects were scattered and are hidden in different places.”
“And the ngoma? Where do you think that may be?” I asked.
This was a wooden drum used to store sacred objects. The
tribe had followed the ngoma, carrying it aloft, on their sojourn
through Africa. They claim to have brought it from Israel so
many years ago that no one remembered when. According
to their oral traditions they carried the ngoma before them to
battle and it had guided them on their long trek through the
continent.
According to Lemba oral tradition the ngoma used to be
carried before the people on two poles. Each pole was inserted
into the two wooden rings that were attached to each side of
the ngoma. The ngoma was intensely sacred to the tribe, practically
divine. Sacred cultic objects were carried inside. It was too
holy to be placed on the ground: at the end of a day’s march it
was hung from a tree or placed on a specially constructed platform.
It was too holy to be touched. The only members of the
tribe who were allowed to approach it were the hereditary
priesthood who were always members of the Buba clan. The
Buba priests served and guarded the ngoma. Anyone who
touched it other than the priests and the king would be struck
down by the fire of God, which erupted from the drum itself. It
was taken into battle and ensured victory. It killed the enemies
of its guardians.
I had first heard of the ngoma months before in South Africa.
Professor Mathivha had told me what he knew about it and I
had had a detailed account from an old Lemba man called
Phophi who was steeped in the history of the tribe. Phophi had

told me how big the ngoma was, what its principal properties
were, and what traditions were associated with it.
I also knew that some forty years before, an ancient ngoma
had been found by a German scholar called von Sicard in a
cave by the Limpopo, the crocodile-infested river that marks
the border between Zimbabwe and South Africa. He had
photographed it and the photograph had been included in a
book he had written on the subject, but apparently the ngoma
had long since disappeared without a trace. Mathivha, Phophi,
and other Lemba elders had told me that the artifact found by
the German in its remote cave was without doubt the original
ngoma that the Lemba had brought from the north.
One night, a few weeks before the rain dance, sitting up late
around the fire with Sevias and other old men, I heard a little
more of the legend of the ngoma.
“The ngoma came from the great temple in Jerusalem,” said
Sevias. “We carried it down here through Africa on its poles. At
night it rested on a special platform.”
It suddenly occurred to me that in form, size, and function
the ngoma lungundu was similar to the biblical Ark of the
Covenant, the famous lost Ark that had been sought without
success throughout the ages. The biblical description of it,
which I knew from the years I spent as an undergraduate
studying classical Hebrew at Oxford, was etched in my mind:
(an Ark of shittim wood: two cubits and a half shall be the length thereof,
and a cubit and a half the breadth thereof, and a cubit and a half the
height thereof […] thou shall cast four rings of gold for it, and put them
in the four corners and two rings shall be on one side of it and two rings
in the other side of it. And thou shall make poles of shittim wood and
overlay them with gold. And thou shalt put the poles into the rings by the
sides of the Ark, that the Ark may be borne with them. The poles shall be
in the rings of the Ark; they shall not be taken from it. And thou shalt
put into the Ark the testimony which I shall give thee[font=Lucida Sans Unicode][/font])

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